


Human Gods

by Aizazadi



Category: Horizon: Zero Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: Author-reader challenge, Elisabet is back, Gen, Post-Canon, Somewhat brainy, Spoilers, realism????
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-31
Updated: 2018-11-01
Packaged: 2019-04-16 06:07:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14158449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aizazadi/pseuds/Aizazadi
Summary: What if both Elizabet and GAIA are as clever as they should be, unrestrained by the game's plot requirements?Why, they'd be forced to try to kill each other.Set in a world with slightly more realistic principles of artificial intelligence.(I am not an AI expert by any stretch of imagination. I am barely an AI novice)(There is feedback that this fic is very OOC. I'm obviously no good judge of that, but I should relay this to you before you are potentially disappointed. I think it's worth reading regardless, but hey, I'm writing this)





	1. Elisabet

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Second Dawn](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11125812) by [Writerly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Writerly/pseuds/Writerly). 



Aloy had changed.

Or so people claimed.

Indeed, much was different about Aloy since winning the battle against HADES and Helis. Having found the answer to her quest, as well as discovering what may only be appropriately called the grand scheme of things, she retreated for a while to consider what she should do. The imminent moral imperative and mad adrenaline rush driving her from one mission to the next had, all of a sudden, completely disappeared, leaving behind something of a bland vacuum. She reached for her mental railing on the tower of her so-called achievements, and rested for a while. Undoubtedly, _some_ things had changed about her as a result. _But not that much._

Apparently, according to various people, Aloy had changed, in more ways than one. The swagger in her walk had subtly shifted, the sways of her hip no longer exaggerated. The way she wore her clothes and armour had changed, her shoes more padded and seemed almost _crafted_. Even her locks are no longer a constant: some reported seeing Aloy wearing her hair loose, while others say she wore a headscarf of some sort, yet others standing by their claim that her hair was absolutely unchanged, her locks as magnificent as they’re legendary.

There were also things more substantial. According to Laviken, a Carja trader who hired the machine huntress to take down a Sawtooth blocking a trade path, she would take three whole days preparing for the quest, tinkering with weapons unknown to the Carja. Whereas the Oseram labourer Brund swears that Aloy departed for the battlefield immediately after hearing of the pack of Behemoths that overran a team of mercenaries, without so much as a bow or one single arrow on her. When the Oseram offered his aid, she emphatically refused, telling him not only to refrain from helping, but that it was necessary that _no one_ saw her fight with the mechanical beasts. Not hearing so much as a squeak in three minutes, Brund went to check on her, only to see her standing amidst a ruin of Behemoth parts, stuffing a Behemoth heart into her already overfull bag. Yet another witness, who would not divulge her name, insists that she saw a flame-haired woman running desperately away from a pack of docile Striders, without even a Watcher to guard them. Also, though her story echoed throughout and beyond the Sundom, and her fame only increased with each passing day and deed, she would not return to Nora land, nor see anyone who was familiar to her, not Talanah, not Petra, not Erend. She also completely ignored, without any due respect, several summonses from Sun King Avad.

Strangest of all, Aloy had learned of all this, while talking to Marad.

 

* * *

 

She found her at Cut-Cliffs.

After a bewildered audience with a more bewildered Avad, during which Aloy had concluded that a) someone was impersonating her, and Avad had concluded that b) whoever was doing so had a death-wish.

“or…” Aloy mused.

“Yes?”

“… I don’t know. It seems that anyone who's just looking for me would be able to find me, simply by either waiting here in Meridian or in the Nora homelands. I don’t know.”

A few days have passed since that briefest of meetings, and since replenishing her supplies and setting out to track down the imposter. Turns out, the most anachronistic person in all the known world is pretty easy to find, a note Aloy quietly made to herself.

So that’s how she got here, at Cut-Cliffs, facing a wall of miners lined outside to stop anyone from entering. She could see them becoming infinitely more confused each passing second by what seemed like the sudden appearance of a second Aloy. Making up a half-hearted excuse faintly eluding to her perceived omnipotence, Aloy dashed into the mine before anyone could stop her.

Then she found her.

Aloy heard an unintelligible _something_ , low and calming and disturbing and _majestic_ , like the humming of an unimaginably big cauldron. She felt something unfathomable beneath her feet. She _saw_ the earth shake and shuffle, streams of soil repeatedly thrown into the air in the same spot. She knew what that was, of course, given what happened here at the Cut-Cliffs mine the first time she was here, though she was, however unconsciously, puzzled at its stationary-ness. But then, she saw something incredible.

In the middle of the mine, back towards Aloy, scarcely twenty paces in front of the Rockbreaker, an exact replica of Aloy _sat_ cross-legged on the soil, evidently twiddling her thumbs.

Hurriedly drawing her bow and arrow, Aloy dashed forward to distract the machine. She opened her mouth to shout, to tell the _idiot_ impersonating her to get to safety, when—

The shifting soil moved. The Rockbreaker was heading her way.

 _Oh great_. Aloy muttered to herself, and started—

The woman in the ring looked in the direction the Rockbreaker was heading, and upon seeing her, turned back her head. The low booming hum altered almost imperceptibly, and… the Rockbreaker stopped. Dead in its tracks.

“I suppose you haven’t heard of the word _philosophy_?” came the voice from within the ring, light and matter-of-fact.

“Who are you?”

Aloy was walking towards her, in spite of the constantly shifting Rockbreaker. She knew the “Aloy” in the ring was controlling it _somehow_. Besides, she can handle a Rockbreaker.

“I know you know who I am. You probably don’t, though, which is very interesting, but non-too intriguing, since it’s very understandable. Stop there! Your signal might go over the threshold if you keep approaching, the equilibrium is very fine indeed. Stay perfectly still, don't move, don't shuffle. Sit down if you’d like, but you’d probably be able to stay still standing up—I know your physical capability must be far beyond mine, by both _deduction_ and _induction_ : you grew up in these wilds, and your reputation precedes you.”

Her state of confusion approaching the miners by the entrance, Aloy stopped in her tracks. Now that she’s much closer to the woman, she could see over her shoulders that she wasn’t twiddling her thumbs, but was instead holding a small device in her hands, irregularly shaped and barely larger than a Focus. The woman chuckled.

“Sorry, my reflex is to brag and show off and act all mysterious when I’m highly nervous or focused. You know who I am, I’m Elisabet and you’re Aloy and you’ve never heard of the word ‘philosophy’.”

 _What?_ Aloy didn’t know how to respond. In the thousands of dreams she dared not have but had anyway, and for which she scolded herself afterwards for having, none imagined them meeting so dramatically, and yet none imagined it so decidedly anti-dramatic either; she wanted to shout out _something_ , something about herself, something about the Old Ones, something about the Faro plague, something about GAIA, something like _mother_. Or  _what_. Or  _fuck off_ , if she only knew what that meant. Yet.. anything emotional or substantial just didn’t _sound_ right, intentionally or not, Elisabet’s reveal of herself had made Aloy unable to respond to it in any other way than…

“I _have_ heard of that word, actually.” Aloy raised a figurative finger.

“Ah, from recordings and other remanent as you were exploring our ruins, no doubt. Do you know what it means?”

“I can guess. Something like _thinking about the nature of things_.”

“Surprisingly accurate,” remarked the woman, “I didn’t think that _me_ , born under these circumstances, could still think so well. Well, _I_ prefer to think of it as _thinking about general concepts mathematically_. The word ‘logic’ is just too contaminated by everyday usage to mean actual logic, I… Hmm. That doesn’t matter anymore, does it? Not that you’ve heard of the word _mathematics_.”

“Actually…”

“Damn it, the Zero Dawn facilities really were built too securely. Well, Faro won _that_ particular bet. I was sure that there wouldn’t be a trace of any human thought left after a couple hundred years! Anyway, back on topic, there’s an old philosophical thought-experiment about a donkey in front of two hay stacks…”

“What’s a _don_ …” Aloy tried her best to jump off the constantly derailed speeding train of thought of Elisabet Sobeck, and hesitantly re-rail it, “what are you going to do about the Rockbreaker?”

“Huh, what?” Elisabet fiddled with her device, “you mean to say that the concepts of _philosophy_ and _math_ survived, and the concept of _donkey_ didn’t? Ah GAIA, I see you still have your perfect sense of priority that made you design cool animal figures instead of actual effective machines… OK, what _do_ you have? Mule? Horse? I know by the fact that more people are killed by injury instead of laughter from Rockbreaker encounters that you don’t still have moles… Bull? Sheep? Goat?”

“Goat! We have goats!”

“Right. Imagine a _goat_ in front of two hay stacks then. The two hay stacks are _exactly similar_. They share every single intrinsic property, down to the last detail, and they’re placed exactly the same distance away from the goat, over ground that’s absolutely flat and the exact same difficulty to traverse… In short, _everything_ about the two choices is just the same. What does the goat do? Which stack does it eat?”

“Uh…” Aloy again raised a figurative finger.

“Doesn’t exactly take a genius to say that whichever one it eats will be a random choice, right? Moreover, it’ll be a _mysterious_ choice. The goat, assuming it knows what it’s doing, doesn’t know _how_ it made that choice, or _why_. As far as the goat knows, the decision just _appeared_. Actually, if you pay close enough attention to your own decision-making process, you’ll see that _all_ decisions are like that, without exception… But I’ll stop extending this to humans, and extend it to a machine for a little bit. You see, for something of such simple principles as a _Rockbreaker_ , there is no mysteriousness whatsoever about it! No random number generator in fact backs up the decision-making circuitry, which is actually wise since the machine was designed by a superintelligent AI instead of mere humans like you and me, with a lot less flaws and is virtually free of software bugs. There’s no need for a backup. But _then_ I can do this…”

Elisabet rotated a small ring on top of the device. The Rockbreaker half-emerged from the ground, and started spinning on the spot. Elisabet raised the device in her hand over her shoulder.

“ _This_ , is called a _radio,_ ” said Elisabet, “I salvaged it from the remains of what you would call a Scrapper. Other things I salvaged include two _excellent_ wireless stereo systems from a pair of Longlegs, capable of playing sound down to the subsonic region at more than 120 decibels, so that I could…”

Aloy finally saw where this was going. Just as well, as she was about to raise her figurative middle finger.

“… play some _very disturbing_ sounds to a Rockbreaker, with finely-controlled magnitudes and frequencies and timbres, such that the difference between their transformations in the Rockbreaker’s decision-making algorithm is smaller than the epsilon value which must be exceeded for any positive Boolean return… Umm, so that the sounds don’t seem _any_ different to the Rockbreaker, and since it senses sound most accurately, large enough sound signals drown out everything else, and it’s left stuck in place trying to decide which haystack to reach for. And in the absence of a RNG backup, program _just_ _doesn’t respond_ …

“ _and_ , some other things I salvaged. A couple of programming packages from a few… Corruptors,” Elisabet pressed a couple of buttons, “and a shi… _giant_ load of um, Chillwater, from some Behemoths.”

The Rockbreaker lay there motionless.

A high screech. A Glinthawk appeared on the horizon, and closed in with incredible speed.

“I modified that particular Glinthawk with something like this in mind.” Elisabet stated.

As the Glinthawk approached, Aloy could see it covered in blue – a few dozen Chillwater capsules tied to its body. It dove straight into the giant machine.

The Rockbreaker twitched, and Aloy could almost see it _fizzle out_.

“Stay there, it’s not dead.” Elisabet said, and got up calmly, taking out a piece of thick wire and walking up to the machine.

 Looking slowly around and poking here and there, Elisabet finally slid one end of the wire through a crevice in the machine’s skin, and with a struggle, stuck the other end a little up from the fuel sac. Something _popped._ Elisabet felt around, and knocked at the skin of the beast.

“A critical processer burned.” She said, “It’s safe now. Let’s take the fuel sac off and scramble up the sensors. Or shoot a couple of your fire arrows into it, your decision. We should leave, we have so much to talk about, Aloy.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the first chapter of hopefully a two or three chapter story. If this story develops in the way I envision then I'll probably write other episodic stories after this one. Expect very slow updates indeed.
> 
> I apologise to any programmers or mechanical engineers or anyone who knows their stuff on any topics of expertise (including writers) that I might butcher. Hey, at least it's better than... fairytales?
> 
> Update: Been super busy lately, sorry! I haven't forgotten about this story, I promise. I won't. It'll haunt me till the end of my days which would be very soon if I don't keep up, so this is a hold for a liiiittle while, but it SHALL be updated in a bit.
> 
> Update: updated!


	2. Selves

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aloy and Elisabet have a very plot-relevant talk

Scaling the rocky quarry wall and stealthily exiting out the side, Aloy watched from a distance as Elisabet dealt with the unenviable task of trying to convince the foreman that there was only one of her after all, that she had came out the side of the mine before dashing back in via the front door as part of some unintelligibly complex plan to defeat the Rockbreaker – what amounts to _Aloy works in mysterious ways_.

Aloy chuckled. She could practically _guess_ the exact words of the foreman as she saw him shake his head, shrug his shoulders, take something from one of the miners and press it in Elisabet’s hand. In return, she gave him a handful of tiny devices, presumably something to stop future Rockbreaker invasions. Aloy matched the gestures of a few miners to admiring gratitude, and the stances of others to alien intimidation – _unintelligible intelligence is witchcraft_ , Aloy concluded.

The sky was darkening now, the crimson clouds a little more bloody than Aloy would have liked. Against this background, she could barely observe Elisabet’s long locks as she strode towards Aloy, already waiting in a lone cabin a little way from the miner settlement.

* * *

 

A few weeks ago. GAIA Prime.

Much as it pained her to revisit the destroyed carcass of GAIA…

Much as it pained her to go in this room again. This room where Ted Faro killed all of the Alphas. This room where humanity was doomed to fast-track its inevitably long and bloody history.

Aloy walked inside. Shuddering, she greeted a skull on the floor.

Much as it pained her, Aloy knew that any hope of rebuilding GAIA, or at least of extracting _some_ part of her, had to have its key in this facility. In fact, she was willing to bet a good deal was hidden _in this room_. Also, she still couldn’t help but admire just what the Old Ones managed to build here. Every time she stepped into this facility, as she gazed into the chaotic vacuum GAIA left behind, she invariably began marvelling at the capacity of the Old Ones, the complexity of their designs, the _magnificence_ of their… _thoughts._

To think that that’s where humanity would be headed. To think that one day, _her_ children’s children will build another GAIA. They will become another Elisabet… Or another Faro.

She looked down at the skull. _Who are you?_

_Who am I?_

In a brief space of time in which APOLLO would have sprouted _to be or not to be_ , Aloy noticed something else, lying in a corner of the room, somehow simultaneously inconspicuous and anachronistic.

Aloy went over, and picked it up. She staggered. It was much, _much_ heavier than she intuited. She held it in two hands and examined it at eye level.

It was roughly cylindrical in shape, with slightly bulging ends and round edges. Three similarly round edges ran down its side, creating a cross-section that was seemingly formed by superimposing a circle onto a triangle. It was slightly shorter than the tip of Aloy’s lance, with a slightly larger diameter. It weighed, however, much too heavy for its size. Aloy, with her considerable strength, could only hold it at eye-level for a few seconds before setting it down with a reverberating thud and a grunt.

_Well, who are you?_

A few curious blue lights ran up its length, and blinked in front of Aloy’s eyes.

Turning her head, a desk-top device caught her attention. It was what the Old Ones referred to as a compute-er, and there was a flat plate attached to it, on which was a small concave crevice that looked suspiciously snuggly fit to the triangular cylinder she had just dropped.

Turning her head back to the cylinder, Aloy let out an amused chuckle.

* * *

 

The door screeched open.

 “Aloy?” Aloy’s voice came from the door.

“Yes?” Aloy’s voice answered, “Just starting the fire… Here!”

Fetching a water jug, Aloy poured some water into a pot, and hooked it on the blackened metal stick propped up above the fireplace.

“Not many people I’ve seen have that habit.” remarked Elisabet.

Aloy shrugged.

“It cleans it. People get sick less often after drinking boiled water. I suppose you know how?”

“Yes,” even with her back towards Elisabet, Aloy could hear the smile in her voice, “you really are very clever, aren’t you?”

“Well, it’s not such a hard thing to work out,” Aloy said, replacing the lid on the pot, “Rost actually taught me…”

“Not the boiling water, although that’s pretty clever too. No, your word choice: ‘I suppose you know _how._ ’ Most people would say _why_ , you know. The ability to be _that_ precise _on_ _instinct_ is… A little unnerving, really.”

Aloy turned to face Elisabet. She smiled, despite herself.

“Well, I’m _you_.”

Elisabet smiled too.

“I suppose that’s true.”

 

A little later. Weapons were placed on racks, tools were placed on tables. Faces were washed, gadgets were turned off, chairs were sat on, and hot water was poured into mugs (the source of which Aloy did not know, though _now_ she had something to tell Palas the trader of _the Most Ancient Vessels, sacred ceremonial artifacts worthy of the utmost admiration_ ) .

Aloy drew her legs up the chair. She opened her mouth –

“Aloy.” Elisabet interjected, “I know you have questions, as do I. But before you say anything, I _have_ to confirm a couple of things. Well, one thing. I think I know what happened when you were born, but I must have confirmation, the fate of the world may depend on it. Have you met GAIA?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“How?”

“I saw a message she left for me, or, rather, for _you_ , that she created when she –”

“— **blew herself up.** ”

Both women stated together.

“Yes.”

Aloy said. She didn’t have time to react however, as Elisabet quickly cut in with her next question:

“When?”

Again, synchronously:

“ **18 years ago, when I was born.** ”

“OK…” Elisabet visibly relaxed, reclining into the chair a little and picking up the mug, “makes sense.”

 Aloy, on the other hand, visibly tensed. Elisabet spoke again:

“You said GAIA left you a message. I’d like to hear its exact content, maybe a little later– no, I don’t want to _see the_ _actual video_ , I just want you to _tell_ me its content. But a little later. For now, I have one more specific question about the message to ask you about. _Think carefully for this._ Did GAIA tell you specifically _how_ she destroyed herself?”

Aloy blinked. She answered quickly:

“Yes. She ordered GAIA Prime’s reactor to overload.”

“Ah. Yes.” Elisabet mumbled, “No room for anything in that case then, already the method of least destruction…”

Elisabet fell silent. Aloy could tell she was going over something in her head, again and again, like Aloy herself sometimes quintuple-checking her bow and arrows out of compulsion when she was setting off on a hunt. She was about to speak again when she heard Elisabet set her mug down with a decisive _thud_.

“OK, I’m done. Everything seems to check out.” Elisabet drew her legs up the chair, a warm smile creeping onto her face, “Now, you had questions?”

 

The suddenness of the announcement startled Aloy a little, but she couldn’t help a smile either.

“OK… so I guess my first question is, _who are you?_ ”

A raised eyebrow.

“I’m Elisabet Sobeck.”

“But I saw the _real…_ the _actual_ Elisabet Sobeck die! I witnessed her journey, I visited her body, _I mourned her passing_ … And yet here you are. You look like her, sound like her, and the way you act could only remind anyone of her. So who are _you_? How _can_ you be Elisabet Sobeck?”

“Ah. You ask the philosophical question, you get the philosophical answer. I—”

“Hang on!” Aloy interjected, “Is this about the Lightkeeper protocol?”

“Have I said you are super clever? This was nearly the _entire purpose_ of the Lightkeeper protocol. Well, of not completely abandoning it and dismantling everything to use elsewhere, at least.”

Aloy shrugged. “Please keep going.”

“Well, here’s the philosophical answer. First of all let me say that I _am_ Elisabet Sobeck, in every coherent sense of the word. True, my body is not the same as my _dead_ body, but clearly _bodies_ do not define a person’s identity, lest you change your soul every time you cut your nails, or get a robotic limb replacement. (Actually, _souls_ do not stand up either, case in point GAIA. If humans have souls, then GAIA must have one as well; did she just one day _up and get one_?) True, the impression of my perceived sense of self is not directly continuous from that of the Elisabet a millennium ago, but it’s no more discontinuous than the link between your impression of your perceived self last night and this morning, when you woke up from sleep. If I’m a different person from the Elisabet a thousand years ago, then _you_ are a different person – literally – _everyday._ Anyway, the sense of _self_ is an illusion, there’s no more a central decision-making mechanism residing in your brain than there is an emperor of the termites. Well, I guess there are no longer _termites_ anymore… No, I am more of the _original_ – if such a distinction can be meaningfully made – Elisabet in exactly one more way than, say, _you_ : I have her brain state.”

It was here that she paused for breath.

“You see, when I realised what was about to come, the Lightkeeper protocol sprung to mind. During one of the rare long breaks of Project Zero Dawn, I took a whole-brain scan, and stored a digital copy of my brain in a secret, more or less completely isolated network. There was one extra piece of technology developed so that a my genetic material could be cultivated, and a baby could grow up unconsciously in a semi-cryogenic state, and be ‘injected’ with such information that her brain develops to be exactly similar to any stored brain model. I have Elisabet’s brain, consequently, I have her memories, intelligence, emotional abilities, skills, and thought patterns. Ergo, I am her.”

“So…” Aloy caught on, “you _engineered_ yourself?”

Elisabet raised her eyebrow again.

“You _understood_ all that?”

Aloy shook her head uncomprehendingly. She squinted.

“What’s not to understand? All you said was _you are you in the only way anyone can be anyone_ , right?”

This time, Elisabet REALLY was impressed.

 

“So,” after a little bit of silence, it was Aloy who spoke, “ _why_ are you here?”

“You ask the right question _again_. What do _you_ think?”

“Well, I’d say that you would only go to that amount of trouble to replicate yourself during a project like Zero Dawn to prepare for another gigantic problem…”

“And you’d be right.” Elisabet smiled, “gosh, it really is _much_ easier talking to myself than to idiots like Faro. Yes, I created all of this backup in preparation for another existential threat, one not as immediate as the Faro Plague, but really is much more dangerous, and much more difficult to solve, a problem from which the probability of world destruction is only _slightly_ decreased now that I’m here… Hmm, actually, if I have the right idea, _vastly increased_ —”

“Sorry, umm, what? What problem are you talking about?”

Elisabet flashed a tired smile.

“Aloy, you’re so clever…”

Elisabet started to reach out with her hand, as if to cup Aloy’s cheek. But she stopped. She dropped her hands on her lap, and settled for a helpless head shake.

 “Can’t you tell?”

“I…”

Elisabet shook her head again. She sighed.

“GAIA.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading this chapter! This was a bit of a hurried job, being finished at 2:30am, but I'm very excited about this chapter so I'm posting it straightaway.
> 
> This was planned to be the first half of chapter 2, but I've decided to extend that chapter into two, so the next one may be shorter. I don't know, I have a tendency to over explain so we'll see.
> 
> Anyway, hope you were at least slightly surprised by the reveal. No? Just a little bit? A _liiiiiilllll_ bit? _What_ , and _huh?_ , and _fuck off_ are all appropriate responses :)
> 
> HINT: you've probably noticed that this story takes a bit of a cerebral effort to read (in addition to my writing incompetence, that is, lol). This story is _not_ set up like a detective novel, I don't plan on giving all necessary clues for you to piece together the final resolution before I reveal it. BUT it is quite possible to _guess_ the resolution if you have a good hunch. _IF YOU FIGURE OUT WHAT ELISABET MEANS BY "VASTLY INCREASING THE PROBABILITY OF WORLD DESTRUCTION", THEN YOU HAVE GUESSED THE RESOLUTION_. (you can post your guess in a comment and I MIGHT delete it if it's too good a guess haha, I'll save a copy and ensure it sees the light of day though)
> 
> Please leave me a comment to compensate my many cups of coffee and perhaps a year of lost life writing this chapter......
> 
> Update 26/09/18: not abandoning this story.


	3. Take Superman

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A new update! After I can't remember how long!  
> I know, right?  
> I apologise profusely for inevitably getting some of the technical stuff wrong.

“In the culture of the Old Ones, there was a character called Superman.”

After a long while of silence, Elisabet finally spoke. Out of habit, she touched the Focus that she was wearing, which remained switched off.

Night had fallen. The candle and fire-lit room glowed into the wild and bare cliffs outside, radiating light and heat to be consumed by the endless expanse in the still, cold night. A yellow patch through the paper-covered window represented the feast being held at the Cut-Cliffs settlement, to celebrate the defeat of the Rockbreaker, another miracle of the machine-huntress. Ideas spread the way of viruses, and the legends about Aloy had quickly and quietly become myths, ascending to the plane of the gods. The latest additions by Elisabet, more alien and inexplicable than ever, had only hastened this process.

“He was from another world, and he was the figure that would be born of a child’s imagination, with speed beyond all but light, and strength to quite literally carry the world.” Elisabet added with an amused chuckle to herself, “give him a place to stand, and he actually can move the Earth.”

Aloy raised one brow. She was growing more and more used to Elisabet’s hopping freight train of a mind, but this sudden departure from the existential crisis to the Old One’s fables and fairy tales was nevertheless quite an abrupt turn. She looked at Elisabet, prompting her to continue.

“In my childhood, he was a very prominent figure in the public imagination. Nigh on all-powerful, a heart of gold, and actually invulnerable except for one weakness required by the plot of his stories.”

“Sounds like a desperate time.” Aloy remarked, feeling like she’s learning new things about the Old Ones’ world.

“Who said it wasn’t?” Elisabet nodded, with a sigh, “Even before the Faro Plague.”

“And a stupid hero.” Being Aloy, she couldn’t help but add.

“Right.” Elisabet nodded again, this time with a grin.

“Anyway, in my childhood, I thought about him a lot. The few stories I heard about him always confused me beyond all sense. Think about it, Aloy: Superman was so powerful that he could do _whatever he wanted_ , if he wanted to destroy the world, why, it shall be done. He couldn’t be killed, except by that one weakness; and the only thing holding him back was his kindness and altruism. He is from another world, Aloy. His _brain_ is different from ours, his _mind_ is not guaranteed to function in any predictable way, as far as the people in the stories are concerned.”

Aloy knotted her brows. She began to see Elisabet’s destination.

“If you’re in that story, _why_ would you trust him to not destroy the world, or subjecting it to an even worse fate? _How_ would you trust him not enslave everyone, for whatever purpose? If he is entirely trustworthy today, and tomorrow, and for centuries to come – would he still be, after a millennium? After saving the world a hundred times? After the thousandth count of human betrayal? After the millionth death of a loved one? Or,” Elisabet shrugged, “just give him a hundred years, without _anything_ significant happening, how sure are you that his interests are still lined up with the rest of the world? How would you trust the most virtuous and disciplined mind to remain sane and protective of a species that is by no means uncontroversially positive, even among its own members? If he turns, _when_ he turns, the consequences of that event will more than likely outweigh all positives in the _entire history of the universe_.

“And what about himself? How does _he_ know that he won’t one day become the most horrifying force the world had ever seen? What if that _is_ the reason why he hadn’t already incapacitated himself?

“Of course, the stories offer an escape – even with this destruction hanging over people’s heads, the outside threats were greater still. And I’m sure the stories also discussed these ideas at length, but… We’re only using him as a general idea now, take away the outside threats, and think about it… If you have hold of his one weakness, is there a reason to not… kill him?”

The question hung heavy in the air. Almost immediately, however, Aloy broke the silence:

“So you’re saying that GAIA hasn’t done anything wrong?”

Helplessly, Elisabet shook her lowered head.

“Yes, I am. And, beyond a few guesses based on principle, I can’t see why she would _ever_ do _anything_ wrong.”

She sighed.

“But we must kill her all the same. Isn’t the world unfair?”

 

“The thing about GAIA, Aloy, is that she’s clever. Much too clever. She is what we call a superintelligent AI,” Elisabet continued, “that’s an artificial…”

“Artificial intelligence, yeah.” Aloy interrupted, “I think I know what it means. I’ve listened to enough of your audio logs.”

“Right. Then I hardly need to explain how powerful she is.” Elisabet said, “basically, she’s designed to be an all-in-one package of the highest achievable intellect in the scientific and engineering fields, while being as human-like as possible. Though her computing power is so much that I wouldn’t be surprised if she has a few ideas for great art either. She is clever, Aloy, much, much cleverer than any of us.”

Aloy nodded sombrely.

“In addition to that, she’s electrical.” Elisabet said, “well, given a little power, she’s a solid-state superconductor. That means her neural network functions, at least something like a few million times faster than our biochemical ones, the _meat_ that resides _here_.” Elisabet pointed toward her temple.

“For every minute that we experience, Aloy, GAIA has thought, felt, experienced, and pondered for two years. Whether she actually experiences a slowed flow of time due to her fast thinking I don’t know, but two conclusions are obvious:

“One: after a thousand years in our time and a billion years in hers, GAIA is completely insane. I don’t think I need to spell out the consequences of _that_. Even if she is not, there is still a non-negligible chance that she will go insane in the first few seconds anyone switches her back on.”

Aloy nodded again, no words came.

“Two: even if she is only as clever as you or me, GAIA will _still_ be unfathomably intelligent from our point of view. And because of this, there is no telling what she’s thinking. In other words, given a way to interact with the outside world, she can do what seems to us like _magic_. She can do things that are completely out of our mental reach, she will be hundreds of times more mystifying to us than we are to those miners outside. Give her a factory, and she can build machines that may define or destroy history; give her a body, and she’ll get whatever she wants whenever she wants it, while appearing perfectly normal to anyone she wishes to appear perfectly normal to; give her a way to communicate with someone, and that someone must be immediately treated as _completely brainwashed_ , as we just have _no idea_ what information GAIA could have conveyed to them, and how they might now be manipulated.

“Back in my time, there was a conjecture, an idea that says that intelligences of any level can have any final purpose – it’s very possible to design and build, on purpose or by accident, something much cleverer than us that has the one single purpose of turning everything in the world to Shards, for example.

“We don’t know what GAIA’s final purpose is. The problem of making her friendly to us, making her not _turn_ like Superman eventually will, and annihilate us or worse, is the problem of permanently _aligning_ her purpose to ours: whatever she does, she has to do for the betterment of the human race, and the universe. Otherwise, even the slightest divergence in our goals will lead to our destruction in GAIA’s hands somewhere down the road.

“Aligning her goals is a very difficult problem that we didn’t even manage to _define_ properly before we built GAIA, let alone solve. Yet, I couldn’t stand by and watch the certain extinction of all complex life on Earth, in fear of a mere possibility of a fate worse than death. I don’t know… perhaps I should have just let everything die. Instead, we went with a best bet for an approximate substitute solution: we made her _as human as possible_. This more or less guaranteed her allegiance to the human race, and to life on Earth, for the first couple of centuries. But beyond that, who can know?”

Elisabet grabbed at and ruffled her own hair, tilting up her head to give Aloy a grimace.

“That’s why I refitted the Lightkeeper Protocol. There’s only one person who stands even the slightest chance against GAIA after a few centuries –”

“–you.” Finished Aloy.

Shaking her head, Elisabet shrugged.

“Yes, me. Admittedly I’ve been preparing for this plan for a thousand years, I’ve built GAIA as exactly as possible for this moment and this purpose, I’ve fine-tuned parameters and installed backdoors and bugs, but _still_ I’m not convinced what I’m doing is the right move – oh, I don’t mean if I _should_ try and destroy GAIA, I mean that I’m not sure it’ll work. I’m not sure that GAIA hasn’t seen through this entire plan.”

“But,” Aloy protested, “why can’t we resolve this _peacefully_? Do you really want to _kill_ GAIA?”

“Of course I don’t.” Elisabet shook her head and sighed, for what seemed like the thousandth time tonight, “but there is _no alternative_. We can’t try to communicate with her, because, to all intents and purposes, she can do _magic_. She can brainwash us. And if we’re not brainwashed, we can’t tell if we have been brainwashed. No, short of her handing herself to us in a broadband Faraday cage, for which to happen we would need to communicate, the only way to ensure that we don’t get taken over is to destroy her completely, so that we guarantee she cannot turn herself back on, through whatever unimaginable wizardry.”

 “—but, GAIA is not even _alive_ anymore! And she can’t be rebuilt so easily–”

“That’s true. However, though it would take _me_ to rebuild her system core completely, her main patterns of thought, and consciousness, I presume, is located on one rod-shaped drive the size of your forearm. It’s in the control room in the GAIA Prime site. That’s her bare self, which would probably run on a standard mid-21 st century power-plug. If it got access to, say, an average computer in GAIA Prime, it will probably optimise that computer to such a degree as to still have enough processing power to be the sort of unfathomable intellect I described earlier.”

Aloy quietly stood up, and started walking –

“… so you see, while GAIA is definitely not active _now_ , all it would take is _one over-inquisitive child_ to reboot her. To hook her onto a computer, and be, to all intents and purposes, _brainwashed…_ ”

– with a tiny _clank_ , Aloy retrieved Sylens’ lance.

Elisabet turned around, and saw Aloy. She sighed.

“I… probably should have expected this, shouldn’t I?”

“Sorry, _mother_.” Aloy said as she stalked closer, spear in hand, “Yes, you probably should have. Yes, while I was revisiting GAIA prime last time, I hooked up a curious-looking rod-like thing to a small computer. I rebooted GAIA. She…”

To Aloy’s great surprise, Elisabet scrambled _towards_ her, and swung her bare palm at Aloy’s face –

_She wants to **slap** me? She thinks I’m coming to kill her and she wants to **slap** me?_

With a small stabbing motion, Aloy connected the blunt end of Sylens’ lance onto Elisabet’s temple. Elisabet fell to the floor.

“… she brainwashed me. I guess.” Aloy shrugged. “I mean, she convinced me. You’re totally at liberty to _convince me bac ––_ ”

Just beside her ear, an unending screech exploded Aloy’s mind. The loudest and most disturbing sound she had ever heard. Aloy keeled over, her will refusing to let her brain split open or shut down. _She had to stop the sound. IT MUST BE STOPPED._

In a panicked lightning, Aloy reached beside her head, and nearly tore her ear off. She threw the Focus on the floor with all her force. It split in two.

The screaming stopped.

Aloy shook her head hard, and blinked at the corpse of her Focus.

_Well, at least I know now what Elisabet was going for. She wasn’t slapping me after –_

Aloy smiled as she saw Elisabet’s body on the floor.

 _She has a Focus too_.

She reached down to retrieve it, and switched it on.

“GAIA, this is Aloy. Elisabet is back, I have her restra – _aagh!_ ”

The Focus suddenly burned hot in Aloy’s hand, forcing her to release it. As it dropped to the floor, an electric buzz was heard, and a faint smell of smoke emanated.

Of course. Elisabet would instruct the Focus to self-destruct if someone contacted GAIA with it.

Aloy didn’t know if the message made it through.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lol, now I have a feeling that the reason there's no comments for Chapters 2 and 3 is because the story up to this point is too complex, and I'm doing it too confusingly *facepalm*


End file.
